Battle plan – on Direct action by Ben Russell and Guillaume Cailleau

Should we perceive Direct actionthe latest opus by Ben Russell and Guillaume Cailleau, as the avatar of an avant-garde formalism that depoliticizes and alienates the subject it is supposed to represent? The contemplative form of the film corresponds in fact to a very precise conception of documentary cinema: the two filmmakers claim an aesthetic of duration through the prism of very long sequence shots.

By immersing themselves in the zone to defend (ZAD) of Notre-Dame des Landes (44), Russell and Cailleau nevertheless affirm an approach which reconfigures the ethical and aesthetic relationship to political struggles.

Within world cinema, Ben Russell and Guillaume Cailleau clearly belong to a certain aristocracy. By aristocracy, we in no way mean those few names who monopolize the official selections of international festivals. Certainly, Cailleau and Russell won, in 2024, the prize Encountersthat of a subordinate selection of the Berlin Festival, but their cinema is satisfied with a marginality, well cultivated over time.

If Cailleau and Russell stand apart, it is because their conception of cinema and their working method have something outdated in that they continue to cultivate duration and the film medium. We might therefore be surprised to see these so-called aristocrats dedicate their latest work to the anarchist space of the ZAD of Notre-Dame des Landes (44) where their precepts, which could be described as a formalist posture, based on means heavy techniques (16mm camera placed on a stand), in fact define an approach that Direct Action helps to clarify.

When they tour together, Cailleau and Russell take collectives as their subject. They met in the anarchist district of Exarchia, in Athens where they made the short film together Austerity Measures in 2012 focusing on the Greeks' fight against the austerity policy at the time of the public debt crisis. In 2022, they will set up their camera at the ZAD of Notre-Dame des Landes. Through Guillaume Cailleau, from a family of farmers in the West of France, they came into contact with the inhabitants who authorized them to set up their filming there. Initiated at the end of 2022, filming is spread intermittently over the year 2023, each ten-day session spaced two months apart.

The active presence of the film crew in the ZAD of Notre-Dame des Landes goes hand in hand with participation in the life of this territory. Focused largely on the actions and work of the Zadists, the film's forty sequence shots describe tasks that are not unfamiliar to Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell. On the contrary, this duration of the plans – almost ten minutes each – is assimilated to a process of knowledge, both practical, through the prism of the team's collaboration in collective work, and then hermeneutic, the duration showing in extenso the progress of tasks and the new actions they involve.

These gestures also combine a certain archaism – rather than tractors, the Zadists use draft horses – or a certain modernity like the modern recording of music or the use of machines to split wood. These anachronisms are themselves guided by very practical questions: the means used depend on the donations received by the inhabitants of the ZAD.

Somehow, Direct actionby observing the work, takes a new look at the technique. The gesture (the technique of the body), the machine (the technical object) or the staging device (the cinematographic technique) are reconfigured by the environment of the ZAD, by the promotion of new modes of existence. While the machine marks, according to the Marxist conception, the confiscation of the work accumulated by the proletariat and, in this, its alienation, production, in the case of Direct actionthrough gesture or mechanics, participates in a common objective dictated by the organization of the ZAD.

If there is something of the order of survival in Direct Actionit is in the way in which the gestures of struggle recompose daily life, the way in which the work and days of beings are transformed in the struggle.

Gilbert Simondon defines the technical object as a philosophical object, governed by a relationship to thought and culture. Thus, according to the philosopher, man and machine maintain an ethical relationship that must be reconnected. The reappropriation of various methods, during the film, aims at autonomy, that is to say a disalienation, but this reconfiguration takes place, for the zadists as for the filmmakers, according to an ideological relationship which redefines the relationship of the inhabitants .es to their instruments.

In the opening scene, a resident of the ZAD presents to the camera the video archives of past mobilizations: from the creation of the ZAD in 2009 to its expulsion in 2018, including Operation Caesar in 2012-2013. It is therefore after the battle that Cailleau and Russell arrive. This retrospective moment revives the history of the place like an exergue, a mention to justify its exclusion. In this sense, one could think that these filmmakers are more interested in “concrete utopia” than in its implementation. If utopia is concrete, it is less in that it formalizes and concretizes abstract ideals than in the way in which the autonomy of the ZAD produces new gestures.

Each sequence shot in the film is fixed, framed only in such a way as to capture the action in progress. Very long, the documentary film has little waste: for twelve hours of rusheswe arrive at three and a half hours of film. This is because filming on film forced the directors to think about and discuss each shot. Thus the documentary project of Guillaume Cailleau and Ben Russell is striking in the way in which it assumes a laconic bias, scattering shots like plots not quite delimited.

Because this opening scene contrasts the digital archive images, compiled on the computer, and the film's camera, a heavy 16mm camera, it allows us to understand the way in which Cailleau and Russell will tell the story. ZAD. The shaky image of the hand-held camcorder or telephone is contrasted by the composed and stable frame of the film image. The digital image, in the film, refers to a historical context, at the beginning of the film, and geographical context, to its middle. It is by taking the eyes of a drone, more particularly of the resident who drives it and who comments live on the images, that we end up discovering the topography of the ZAD seen from the sky. These images, bringing back to a broader environment, remain constantly mediated by the gaze of the inhabitants.

In negative, the film or analog image designs its shots at eye level, at least at gesture level, most of the time opting for close-ups or close-ups. Cailleau and Russell do not intend to write the history of the place, prescribe a discourse about it, and are dependent on other images and other words, much better informed. Since the filming is accompanied by an immersion in the ZAD, an update with the inhabitants, Cailleau and Russell only document what they witness.

If each shot constitutes a block and develops a certain listening to the images, the cut, the passage from one shot to another, is not arbitrary. This produces links, notably during the first movement of the film linking the demolition of a wall, the cutting of wood and its splitting where the destruction is followed by the journey of the materials used for the reconstruction of the building. These symbolic links seek continuity and the editing by association creates a general structure, linking each character. This conception of editing fuels the idea, formulated by the directors, that the gesture is not valid in itself but that all the shots bring together a collective gesture, determined ideologically.

But, suddenly, March 2023 arrives. While a rather obscure meeting presages a mobilization in Sainte-Soline against the mega-basins set up by the agro-industry, the film shifts to another order. The pastoralism of its first two thirds gives way to struggle. If the shots remain fixed and long, they force the filmmakers to move away from the battle, the heaviness of the device preventing them from escaping the grenades[1]. Thus the violence of the clashes takes place at a distance, thwarting both the television image which adds a commentary to all its shots and the militant or counter-information image, often involved in the scuffles.

Where the distancing of the clashes is striking is that it finally allows a group to appear on the screen, a collective in struggle when until now we followed small assemblies or individuals working in the ZAD. As such, a shot, in which the camera is placed above a trench, follows the demonstrators retreating, supporting and helping each other. At the heart of this plan, the hands of those who remain to accompany the others are redesigning new gestures: life in the ZAD and the struggle are not antagonistic things, they complement each other.

So, when we see demonstrators digging up stones from the field to use as projectiles, a cut takes us back to the ZAD where two men extract weeds from a collective vegetable garden. The survival of the gesture of struggle is found in that of “peace time”, a rather illusory time since after Sainte-Soline the police searches resumed on the ZAD. But this gesture, this renewed relationship with the land and the territory, recalls the political origin of the ZAD, that it is the fruit of a struggle. If there is something of the order of survival in Direct Actionit is in the way in which the gestures of struggle recompose daily gestures, the way in which the work and days of beings are transformed in the struggle. Also the ZAD does not manifest itself as an autarkic utopia but as a space of struggles, welcoming some and converging with others.

Ultimately, the documentary practice of Ben Russell and Guillaume Cailleau has none of the formalism that their detractors willingly wish to attribute to them: this contemplative form marks an ethic of representation, that of making cinema available to the service of a collective and of its new standards. The choice of the film medium and the duration thwart the expectations of a film about a collective struggle but do not exclude its political significance. As the ZAD opposes the capitalist order, Cailleau and Russell's method wants to contradict the visual forms dictated by the economy.

On the ZAD, the collective The Scotcheuses had already used the film medium (here the Super 8 camera) to shoot fiction films. The film reused for filming was deemed to comply with the ecological principles of the ZAD and the clandestinity of the people filmed, the digital image being likely to be stolen by police surveillance. This is not quite the bias of Cailleau and Russell who seek, through the prism of the analog medium, to introduce time as a common space. We therefore sense a renewed relationship between the spectators and the screen but also between the camera and the person filmed which results in a sharing of lived time.

Direct Action is ultimately an egalitarian project which, through duration, its capture and its perception, makes sensitive an anachronistic territory, no longer entirely in the past, not yet in the future, the place of a new political experience.

Direct actionBen Russell and Guillaume Cailleau, November 20, 2024.